Life in Culebrón

Every country has some sort of ritual, some sort of symbol, that pulls at the heartstrings and brings tears to the eyes of the true patriot. Maybe it's as the Stars and Stripes ripples in a gentle evening breeze, moments before the flag is struck, standing, hand on heart, thinking land of the free and home of the brave. It could be a Promenader at the Royal Albert Hall on the Last Night exercising their lungs to sing "Land of Hope and Glory". Sometimes the thing is official – "La Marseillaise" for the French almost anywhere and everywhere, or the adulation of the potato, the official state "vegetable" of the good folk of Idaho – and sometimes it's just the ink-black silhouette of a bull. If you've been to Spain you know how that one-dimensional bull stands sentinel over the roads and motorways of the country. If not, maybe you have friends – they may not actually be good friends – who have brought you back the mug with that black bull firmly as...

I like to be active, not climbing hills or doing press-ups active, but doing something out and about. I'm not keen on work as a substitute. I don't need to paint walls or clean the kitchen, prune trees, shop, cook, clean toilets or keep drains clear to keep myself occupied. We're all a bit work obsessed in my opinion. I did a lot of it at one time, the paid sort, and now I look back on it and wonder why I wasted all that time. The pay, obviously, but that doesn't explain its centrality in British society. So here I like to get out and about. We go to fiestas, we go to events, we visit castles, we go to the theatre and concerts and the cinema. We see exhibitions, we go to talks and tramp around forests for stargazing and to hunt out scorpions. Some things are never repetitive, even though you've done them before, because each event is different enough to make it potentially memorable. On the other hand there are some things which are so much of a muchness and start t...